Seeds of life

DNA could survive without water in the vacuum of space for hundreds of thousands of years, researchers in California have suggested. Their discovery will encourage those who believe life may have originated in space.

Water plays an important role in keeping proteins folded into three-dimensional structures. But scientists were unsure how DNA would fare without water, in a vacuum. To test this, Evan Williams and his colleagues from the University of California at Berkeley placed DNA in evacuated chambers.

Their results suggest that DNA could keep its double-stranded structure at room temperature in a vacuum for as long as 35 years (Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol 120, p 9605). "At the very low temperatures of space, the complexes would survive for a very long timenearly indefinitely," says Williams.

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